How Iowa Athletics’ Carver-Hawkeye Arena transforms every weekend in the midst of its busiest season

IOWA CITY — The show starts even before the final buzzer rings out in Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Or this case, before the final awards are announced.

Carver-Hawkeye Arena houses multiple Hawkeye Athletics programs, notably both basketball teams, both wrestling teams and gymnastics, with Iowa volleyball making a few appearances in the facility during fall sports season.

Iowa Facilities Attendant Derek Sampson has helped turn over Carver-Hawkeye Arena from one sport to another more times than he can count.

Sampson also gets the full schedule for the facility in October. He immediately circled two weekends — Jan. 8-11 and Jan. 15-18.

“I kind of look at the schedule early in the year and try to figure out where our busy weekends are, and these last two weekends have been super busy with a lot of flips,” Sampson said. “So I've been kind of dreading this last two weeks for about two months, and it's here and it's almost done.”

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In just that second weekend, Iowa hosted five events in four days — two women’s basketball games, a men’s and women’s wrestling dual, and a gymnastics meet.

It’s a giant puzzle Sampson pieces together, though he’ll admit he dreaded these two weekends because of how stressful it can be. The good news is that he’s not doing it alone, and it’s become so repetitive that even the quieter weekends can be met with near-seamless transitions.

Even if the facilities team is up against an overnight turnover or doing it in just a few hours.

“We do have checklists, but a lot of it just sits in my head,” Sampson said. “If everyone’s doing the job that they're supposed to do, life's easy.”

The process of flipping the arena starts anywhere from a half hour to hour before an event ends. In Saturday’s case, it was after gymnastics. On Sunday, it was in the final moments of the women’s wrestling tri-dual.

Sampson was only at Carver-Hawkeye Arena for Saturday night’s transition, setting up the court floor from the GymHawks’ set up following their win over No. 15 Michigan State to the wrestling circle for No. 3 Iowa women’s wrestling.

That transition took roughly four hours, and it’s usually one of the most complicated flips Sampson helps organize.

“In order to get all them up there, we have to bring our basketball hoops out to get the stuff up,” Sampson said Saturday night. “If we wouldn't have basketball tomorrow and just wrestling, we would probably just leave the mats on the floor and then put them in the loft on Tuesday. But since we have so much going on and a quick flip tomorrow, we're gonna pack everything away so everybody's ready to go.”

Why exactly is it so difficult? For starters, the amount of equipment that needs storing. Gymnastics requires lots of mats, a spring floor, a balance beam, the vault and uneven bars. There’s also judges tables scattered around the floor, over a dozen TV screens, tons of wiring, and ramps to wheel everything in and out of the storage room.

Everything in the storage room also has its own space — and an order that things have to go in. Gymnastics usually falls toward the back of the room, and wrestling mats, basketball hoops and scoring tables are usually closer to the door. That means everything else has to come out of the room and onto the floor to put the gymnastics equipment away.

Welcome to the traffic jam.

“Sometimes we get bottlenecked up,” Sampson said. “So we're trying to work around each other. A lot of times we're working on top of each other.”

Sampson usually recruits different student clubs on campus to bring in extra bodies to help. Sometimes it’s ROTC, and other times it’s men’s club gymnastics or other clubs he can have join in.

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The bigger picture is clear — the more people around to help, the faster the job gets down.

The actual basketball court floor itself doesn’t move, saving the crew tons of extra time. It will, however, get cleaned after every event: after gymnastics, after wrestling, after basketball.

The courtside chairs are one of the final pieces added, timed nicely as the custodial staff finishes its final sweep of the stands. The plastic bottles are collected and donated to Dance Marathon.

Sitting on press row in Section BB or on the concourse, it looks like a coordinated dance. Except you’d miss the conversations, the not-so-quiet humming, the reactions to the NFL playoff games during quick phone breaks every 15 minutes.

“You didn’t have to sit up there the whole thing, you know!” Sampson called out as he finished taping down the photographer’s lines. It was after 10 p.m. by then, right at that four-hour mark. “You could’ve helped!”

It felt like I blinked and Carver-Hawkeye Arena had transformed. The concourse switched from the gymnastics posters to the wrestling posters, with women’s basketball ones tucked under the marketing tables.

Sampson was right. Maybe it would’ve been a more productive four hours helping make the transformation happen.

But then I would’ve missed the show.

Comments: madison.hricik@thegazette.com, sign up for my weekly newsletter, Hawk Off the Press, at thegazette.com/hawks.